


Cracks

by Ilthit



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dark Magic, Future Fic, Gap Filler, Gen, Magical Corruption, Shamanism, Underworld, Vengeful Spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 10:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20673797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/pseuds/Ilthit
Summary: One possible timeline from the end of Toivosaari to a death and rebirth.





	Cracks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elleth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/gifts).

_Toivosaari_

Ensi can barely hear Lalli’s footsteps as the boy finally runs off. Good. If Onni doesn’t mess things up, those kids have a chance. They will likely be the only ones.

Ensi sinks back on her knees beside Hilja’s twisted body. She is in no state to guide her soul to rest. Performing the rituals now would be just pissing about. “Hilja,” she says quietly to the body, an unaccustomed whine in her voice. Why, how did this happen? “How could you be so stupid?”

How could _she_ be so stupid?

Ensi grits her teeth. She grabs a handful of the rags Hilja has wrapped herself in and yanks the body on its back. It flops into the sunlight, exposing black, open guts, her tattered under-dress sticking to the hardening meat, but it doesn’t move. That much they did accomplish. The body has that sickly vinegar scent she knows so well, always tied up in her mind with the stench of blood.

And still that shock of ginger-and-grey hair.

Ensi grits her teeth. “Come on. I’m taking you home.”

Her knees aren’t what they used to be, but she props her good leg against a notch in the rock and hauls Hilja over her shoulders. “You’ve got fat, old woman,” she grunts as she takes her first steps back up the hill.

-

Ensi balances on a table to strip down the remains of Hilja’s nest in the rafters. No point leaving a half-constructed thing there for some other infected creature to occupy. (There had been healthy mice and moles on the island, and bats and probably a few ferrets. Not for long, if they’ve been stupid enough to get close to humans. Didn’t she see those awful Niemi boys chasing something just off the town square the other day? Even they wouldn’t bother the cats.)

Here, the stench is stronger. She’s opened every window to let the fresh air in, not that it will do much good in the long run. The nest material goes out into the yard. She piles more things to burn with it: that damned bag with its damned rat, some of the soggy and soiled fabrics, the wilted flowers, the moldy bread, another dead half-eaten thing. Even if it won’t help the village, she’ll have started on the cleansing crew’s work.

She refuses to listen to the voice that is everywhere now, that is inside her, between her ears and in her gut. “I’ll get to you, you bitch,” she mutters to the voice as she builds up the fire. “You piece of vomit. You little shit. You haven’t even begun to deal with me yet.”

Hilja’s body is laid out on top of sackcloth in her bed, on its back, its ribs curling up like the legs of an overturned bug.

“All right,” says Ensi, wiping her hands as she comes back inside. The fire has been bounded by rocks and set blazing, even as the evening has begun to fall. One gunshot has already rung out in the village below; more will follow. Good. It means her friends are performing their duties without flinching.

She wants to cut Hilja’s head off, clean the skull, sing the songs for her, to at least try to extract her soul from the thing that has eaten it. There would be plenty of tall pines around for her final rites, but the gods will not hear her over the dark battering of the kade’s voice. It has been pushing and prodding at her this whole time, telling her to give it up, to go down to join her friends, have a last pint before they all die (before she kills them), before it is too late. It’s telling her how she must miss her children’s children, how she knows where they have gone, how it’s just a little boat ride to go get them back.

She is hungry for them. Especially the two who were born with talent, whose power can be added to her own. Ah, the little one, the one whose body will endure, he is a price. There will be decades ahead of him, perhaps. Far beyond her own aged form. She could still have him.

“No you fucking don’t,” Ensi growls aloud, whether to herself or to the kade. (Is there a difference?) She sits in Hilja’s armchair, her hands resting on her knees, and starts to sing.

These are not the songs for a soul’s passing. These are songs of defiance, old obscenities intact. She remembers sitting on her mother’s knee, her finger tracing the lines in an old book with funny illustrations, learning to read and recite at the same time. The smell of that detergent her mother used to hoard for spring cleaning, the sound of her father’s footsteps, the sound of the wind, and the smell of smoke. These things are Ensi, and not kade.

There still is an Ensi, and she isn’t giving up without a fight.

-

The wind rustles in the leaves overhead, bringing with it the smell of smoke from the island. Their own little fire has died down to a glow of embers. Onni will have to build it up again, to signal the ships when they arrive, but Tuuri is slumped against him, finally asleep, and Lalli has curled up like a cat at his side. They need their sleep. Let it be for a little longer.

He isn’t crying, because he has to be the man now, he has to be the head of what’s left of his family, he has to be strong—but the crying he should be doing sits heavy in his throat as he stares across the water. For the first day, he still hoped that somehow… but he isn’t a child anymore.

They are gone.

He swallows a mouthful of tears.

Lalli sits up in the small hours, wide awake and alert, the weird nocturnal creature he is. Onni, exhausted, curtly orders him to keep watch, and rests his head against Tuuri’s hair. When he opens his eyes, he is sitting at the edge of a different body of water, still staring out across the expanse at the rising smoke.

-

Hunger has become a distant gnaw, barely a twinge in her consciousness. Ensi slumps over Hilja’s quietly rotting body, her song interrupted by a coughing fit.

It hasn’t got all of her yet. Three days, and it hasn’t got her. But neither has she got rid of it.

Time to let go. Time to die. She puts her hand on the handle of her knife, but it will not come out of its sheath. Even the strength of her luonto cannot help her now.

It crackles in the air around her. She is standing up on a stone on the shore, the thick pine grove of her Place rising up behind her. There is the familiar path leading up into the thicket. The trees here are dying.

Her anger sparks, her luonto twists itself around her, and the dry needles catch fire.

-

Onni stands up as the smoke gets higher. He has never seen anything like that here before. “Grandma?”

He forms his hands into a funnel and shouts her name across the waters. There is no answer, not even an echo. The waters swallow it up.

His luonto ruffles its feathers, its shape a heavy presence over his shoulders. It knows what to do, even if Onni doesn’t. And he doesn’t, because even though he’s the oldest grandchild, he’s not immune, and so he’s not important enough to focus on after Grandma took up Lalli instead. He’s had to continue learning on his own, and learning from neighbours instead of his own family. And now all Grandma has is him and a nine-year-old...

With that flash of jealousy, he becomes the owl, and he spreads his wings, lets them carry him up. The only ripple on the water is from the beat of his wings.

Up and up, faster and higher over the seething sea, towards the burning island.

-

_Mora_

Onni wipes his eyes before they can bleed more icicles onto his cheeks. His butt is cold in the snow, but his feet are tired, and he can’t feel his toes, only an electric sparkle of pain whenever he shifts and they rub against his woolen socks.

Never fall asleep in the snow, unless there is a fire nearby and shelter, and someone to shake you awake if you start slipping away. Onni knows the signs. The discomfort means he is still safe. He closes his eyes for just a moment, and then someone is tripping over his legs.

It takes him a moment for the gaggle of voices to resolve themselves to meaning, but he’s here. He’s here and he’s alive.

Maybe his family will be, too.

-

“_Du läser det väldigt konstigt. Pappa sa att du inte har problem med huvudet, bara att du är finsk. Är alla finländarna galna då?_”

“You should be studying your Icelandic already,” Onni grunts in reply to the child. He’s doing his best pronouncing the Swedish on the pages of the book. It’s one about kittens, apparently. “Now listen—No, put that down, sit down and listen.” He grabs the scissors from the child and sets them down firmly. Even if they don’t understand his words, they must understand that.

It comes as a faint cry first, then stronger. The Icelandic mage. That untrained, raw, foreign, weird young man that brought Lalli to him.

He does not need to recite, to pray, or even to center himself. The book still open in his lap, he blinks himself into the other world, following that cry like a beacon. He beats his wings against a rising wing, the billows of evil wafting across the waters. And then there really is a beacon—a bright ball of light winking in and out of sight underneath a flurry of shadows.

He has never seen spirits like this before, but they scatter underneath his claws. The words come then, and the gods respond.

-

The fires of Kokko blaze around him but they do not burn him. It eats him up from the inside instead, dragging him for every last scrap of väki, and he can feel the claws of his luonto cling to his shoulders to stay with him. The great eagle rises up like a crackling bonfire.

The eagle and the owl, the whisper of other spirits beside him, in the air and in the ground, the good gods of the forest, of water and air. Here in their embrace, there is no sign of the corruption of evil. Here and only here--

If he cannot be there for her, for them, he will pour himself out to send them the protection of the gods, for as long as he can.

They are all he has left.

-

Tuuri stares at the radio, afraid to turn it on. Onni will recover sooner or later, likely in just a day or two. She will have to tell him, and she does not want to have that conversation. Either that, or she will have to lie to him, and sell the lie, and let that be the last memory he has of her. Her brother, who told her not to go--

She kicks the door to Reynir’s makeshift isolation chamber instead. “Are you okay? Are you bored?”

“Yeah,” he says after a while. “I guess it’s a bit boring.”

“I can’t imagine it,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a box.”

She’s been trapped in a box of her own biology her whole life.

-

The eagle-owl follows the swan’s path over the dark waters, though he does not know why. He cannot repair his sister’s body. He could do more damage than good if he stops them and her soul becomes lost. But no, no, not his sister. What has he got left if he doesn’t have her?

The sea resolves itself into a broken shore. He has been here before, but never beyond. He glides over the rocks without hesitation, even as the bright bird of his soul flies before him. They speed on up ahead.

The Swan swoops around in midair, lunges at them, and its shadow is the colour of blood. “Onni, stop!” Tuuri’s soul chirps at him from the Swan’s tow. “Go back!”

“No! Come with me! Go back to your body! There must be something that can be done.”

“The rites have been performed,” said the Swan with a voice like bones tangled in reed. “Her body is broken. Everything is in order. Do as she said and go back, mage.”

“Onni, really, it’s all right. Go back for Lalli. He’s still out there, he has no-one but strangers around him. Please. He needs you.”

A split-second of hesitation is all it takes. He is wrenched back over the sea, plunged into its waters. Something shifts against his leg—thick, human legs now—and he pushes out his spirit to repel it, kicks it in the jaw with an ancient curse. He drags himself up, sopping wet, on to the shore of his place. The birches part for him, then close up around him, walling him in.

The leaves shiver with him.

-

_Brúardalur_

The spirits here are different. Onni closes his eyes and sits quietly, feeling the wind, smelling the air. There’s the sound of distant bleating. It takes him back to his childhood, to the last time he locked up the gate of his family’s sheep pen.

There is a vibration here he can only assume is of the foreign gods, the foreign magic. It’s familiar but different, like a common dish made with unknown flavouring. It tastes like a drawn blade. But the dome of the sky is the same. The power of water and earth remain. The weak warmth of the sun… He sits and drinks it in, his mind slipping away from the question at hand.

He came up here on the hill to make a decision, only to find he has already made it. There is nothing else left to do.

He makes his way down eventually as the sun begins to set. The openness of the landscape might be comforting, if it wasn’t so strange. Here, nothing can jump on him, but at the same time everyone and everything can see him coming. One discomfort traded for another.

People mill about the houses, herds are run down into their pens for the night. There must be predators here, then, even if the air is clear of evil.

He could get used to this place. He could be happy here.

Maybe, in some other life.

-

Lalli watches from Reynir’s bedroom as Onni makes his way back down the hill. He could tell that figure apart from even further away—no one else here has that cut of coat.

Onni is avoiding him. They should be training now that they have the leisure, and yet Onni has barely said two words to him since Reykjavik. Lalli has a good idea why. The knowledge is a corkscrew into his gut. But it’s fine, he can take it. He deserves it. It’s not the first time he’s messed up, and he’s not a little kid anymore.

He really tried to do everything right, and do what Sigrun said. You do what you say and you make no mistakes and that’s how everyone survives—that’s what Grandma drilled into him. And she still died. Tuuri died, Grandma died. Everybody died. And he’s beginning to think it would have happened even if there hadn’t been any mistakes. Life doesn’t seem to care how hard you try.

But if you don’t make mistakes and people still die… What does that mean? What can he do? What can any of them do?

He frowns at that distant speck wandering down the hill, and ignores Reynir telling him to get off the bed. It’s only when Emil sets a hand on his shoulder and says something in his broken Finnish that he looks away. Dinner’s ready, apparently.

-

Onni lied.

Lalli could stay here, or go to Sweden with Emil, and let everything dissolve, and live with the knowledge that he really is the last one of his family. Technically, he could.

Really, he has no choice.

-

_The Silent World_

It won’t kill him if it can get his soul instead.

Onni has nothing more to fear, now that Lalli is safe and he has made it this far. There is nothing to lose but what is lost already, and what he doesn’t care about.

He spends the day weaving spells around the little island. They are not spells of destruction, but of exorcism. You cannot kill a kade. He isn’t so bold as to assume he has the power when so many have tried. But he can shred it into pieces, tear the souls from its grasp, send packs of them to the land of Tuoni. It will be something. And it will be a bargaining chip.

When night falls, he is satisfied. Tomorrow, he will set up his beacon.

It is here in these woods, and it is looking for him. Let it find him and destroy itself trying to come to him. Let it crawl to him with its last intact souls. That way, just maybe, he will have a chance, even with the weakness in his blood. If this kills him, so be it.

It finds him before the morning.

Onni watches it paddle across the water at midnight, riding a rotten log, the susurrus of evil at its back like a cloud of flies. It almost caught him off guard.

It screeches when it hits the first of his traps. Onni stands and flexes his arms, takes out his pistol. It won’t hurt the kade, but it may have brought beasts and trolls with it, and he needs to preserve his väki for the kade itself. And indeed, he can see black things stirring in the water.

There is a wild happiness in his chest. He did not expect that, and has no time to process why that may be.

He could finally be free. One way or another. All he has to do now is not look it in the eye.

The first shots echo along the still waters of the lake.

-

“Gunshots.”

Sigrun and Lalli both heard it. She is on her feet before he can scramble up from under the pine tree’s low branches. She kicks Emil, who groans and rolls. “Everybody up. We’re moving.”

“It’s night-time,” Mikkel points out, somehow awake and alert already. “And you’re technically not our captain anymore.”

“It’s practically morning, and I still outrank you, you insurgent.” The summer days are still long enough that the sky is light already. She grins. “Finally, some action.”

Lalli understands ‘morning’, ‘action’, and there are other words he knows. “Mycket… fara. Sigrun, ö… öh...” He gestures at his eyes, then covers them.

“I think he’s saying we need to cover our eyes!” Emil pipes up.

“Well, that’s stupid. How will we see where we’re going?”

“I could make blindfolds,” Reynir offers, yawning, as another shot rings out. It could be near or far—impossible to tell with the sound bouncing off water and rock and trees.

“No time. We go now.”

-

The owl descends upon the ragged empty thing. Onni keeps singing, calling. The water answers, the wind rises. Mists surround the little island, every droplet a knife to tear at his enemies.

There is another spirit beside him, one he hasn’t seen since the burning island, where it danced among the flames. It lopes down the hill. The owl claws at the kade, and the wolf sinks its teeth into it.

It looks up. Its eye is not the bright burning thing it once was, but it bores into Onni’s skull, into the back of his head.

_Idiot,_ says that voice in his head, and it sounds familiar.

The kade is slow, but still moving. Onni grasps the pendant hanging around his neck and lets himself drop down, down, through the crack. This isn’t how he meant for it to go. This isn’t how he meant to do this.

The bird of his soul flies ahead, guiding the way.

-

_Tuonela_

In this dream, her house is burning. Her body is still and quiet. She can feel the wood collapse, the books take flame, but none of it touches her—not the fire, not the crumbling beams, not the falling ash. She is numb and tired. She hopes the dream will end soon, so she can dream about something more pleasant.

In another dream she is a snake, coiled up in a tight ball with other snakes, waiting for spring under frozen ground. Only she knows that spring will never come.

In another, she is flying low over the dark waters again, regretting. She cannot remember what she regrets. The waters will never end. There should be an egg, she thinks, on an island, its shell about to break. There should be a destination.

A bright light through her eyelids. Is this another dream? The light grows brighter and she flinches. The freezing water around her shifts; the ragged underside of the ice above scrapes her hands. Warm blood escapes. But no, that is impossible. The dead don’t bleed.

Her eyes are open, staring at her own hand. A shudder and a thud, and another chunk of ice above is hauled away. She kicks her stiff legs and a hand plunges in, grabs the collar of her uniform, hauls her up and out on to smooth, snowless ice.

Tuuri’s bowels roll and she coughs blood and salt water onto the ice. When the fit passes, everything begins to tingle and ache. Someone is rubbing her back and talking, but her ears are full of water.

“But I don’t have—I don’t have a—“ She doesn’t have a body, why does she ache?

“Go,” says a voice of reeds and bone.

Onni drags her up on her feet. They fail, and he picks her up. “I’m sorry, it will not be easy. When you get there, just run. Get out as quickly as you can.”

Tuuri doesn’t feel like she could run even a step. “Onni, what have you done?” She wipes the last of the water from her eyes and the blurry shape of him sharpens. He has tied a strip of cloth over his eyes, but he’s smiling. Onni is actually smiling.

He shoves something in her hands. A little wooden carving of an owl.

-

_The Silent World_

Tuuri gasps. There is cloth over her eyes. She tears it off and stands up, gets tangled in her own feet and crashes down. She doesn’t remember her legs being this long. But she scrambles up and does as Onni told her.

It’s a warm day. She’d forgotten what the sun felt like, beating down on the bare rock of this island. Down the hill she runs, feet sliding on bits of earth and grass clinging to the rock, towards the sparkle of water. There is a boat there, tied up to a tree-stump hanging off the shore. It bounces on the water as she gets in. She knows that knot, it’s one of Onni’s favourites. Two tugs and the boat cuts loose. She pushes it off the shore.

There is something behind her, something crawling and hurt, but she does not stop to look, instead back-watering until the island has receded into the distance. Only then does she clamber into the forward seat and keep rowing.

Anywhere, just away from here. Her heart beats like a drum, but it beats.

She was dead, she was dead, and now she is… tall.

“What did you _do_?” she murmurs, and is surprised to hear the low rumble of her own voice. That’s when she knows what he has done.

There is the gentle brush of feathers against her arms, the pinch of invisible claws on her shoulders.

She rows and cries and rows more. Evil whispers call to her until, miraculously, a familiar voice carries over the water. Her cousin, calling her brother’s name.

She turns and waves at the boat that has just come out from around the bend of the long, sinewy lake. Even Kitty is there, perched on the peak of the boat. And Reynir, waving enthusiastically.

Later, she cannot remember which of them faltered first; only that it was Lalli who covered Reynir’s eyes with his narrow hand.

-

_Tuonela_

The Swan watches her former charge fade into thin air. The mage falls onto his knees, his shoulders shaking. The Swan nearly extends a comforting wing, until she notes that he is, in fact, laughing.

There has not been laughter here in centuries, and frankly, she finds it somewhat offensive. She withdraws her wing and ruffles her feathers. “I suppose that was rather clever,” she nonetheless admit as he pulls the strap from his eyes. “It had your soul but not your body. Now it has neither.”

He stops laughing and starts to weep, wiping his eyes furiously.

The swan clicks her beak in annoyance. “Well, go on, then.” She gestures at the hole in the ice.

He runs a hand over his forehead, then his face. “I’m not done yet.”

“Oh yes you are.” The swan cranes her neck. “A soul for a soul, in thanks for sending those already passed to their proper places. That was the agreement.”

The mage gets up on his legs. “I said,” he repeats slowly, “I’m not done yet. It’s still alive.”

“You are lost and tired,” says the Swan, “and you gave two thirds of yourself to another. What are you going to do?”

“What Grandma told me to.”

The Swan does not stop him as he makes a slippery, cursing way back towards the edge of the icy expanse, back towards the dreaming sea. Perhaps she is curious to see what he will do.

-

_Toivosaari_

Ensi’s eyes are in shadow when the owl lands, skittering to a halt on the steaming rocks on the shore of the burning island. No, not shadow. They are covered by a strip of scorched cloth, from her torn sleeve.

“You’re here,” she growls. “Good. I haven’t taught you enough, but I will now. Listen...”

\- the end -


End file.
